How should Christians think about AI?: Friction, Formation, and Sermons, with Andy Crouch
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How should Christians think about AI? This episode with Andy Crouch (Praxis) explores faith and artificial intelligence: why friction and "rupture and repair" matter for love and spiritual growth, whether AI should be used for sermons or preaching, and how AI is making us think more theologically.
Description
How should Christians think about AI without losing what makes us human?
Andy Crouch argues that people grow through friction, and that AI risks removing the resistance that we need in order to develop, to grow as spiritual people. The conversation examines whether AI can ever be a substitute for relationships, and whether AI generated sermons are okay, and whether AI can be a tool in part of our ongoing theological and personal formation.
The conversation draws on Crouch's redemptive thesis on AI (linked. below), which names both dangers and its opportunities of AI.
The conversation begins with friction: why a life without physical resistance harms the body, and how this relates to what Jesus says about loving God with all our heart, souls and minds in the greatest commandment. Crouch connects this to rupture and repair, a framework from psychiatrist Curt Thompson, and to sin and forgiveness as its deepest form.
Crouch then considers what happens when an always-available, always-accommodating AI becomes our benchmark for a good friend, counselor, or lover, warning of "emotional metabolic syndrome."
Key topics that we explore with Andy:
Why friction is necessary for growth in love and sacrifice
What rupture and repair means, and why forgiveness is its deepest form
How an AI companion differs from earlier conveniences like the e-card (don’t miss Greg’s take on this!)
Whether pastors should use AI to write sermons
How the Orthodox tradition of reading John Chrysostom's Easter sermon compares with the Protestant expectation of a fresh word (the Protestant “wager”, as Andy describes this)
How AI can serve theological thinking for people with a certain kind of formation, and where it summarizes and flattens complexity (Calvin, Luther)
Why AI reopens questions about what God is like, what humans are for, and what’s irreplaceably human
This is part one of a two-part conversation in Theology Lab's series on faith and AI. For Crouch, the stakes are formation: using powerful tools in ways that keep us growing in love rather than letting us drift into a frictionless life.
Resources
📚 The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here — Kaitlyn Schiess
📚 The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor — Kaitlyn Schiess
🎙️ The Holy Post Podcast — co-hosted by Kaitlyn Schiess
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Should pastors use AI to write sermons? Andy Crouch suggests they shouldn’t, at least not as a substitute for the preacher's own encounter with Scripture. He argues that AI produces the statistical middle of everything already said, while a congregation hopes to hear something fresh and alive from God's word through a real person (esp. in Protestant contexts). He suggests a pastor short on time might read from the tradition, such as John Chrysostom's Easter sermon, set in a specific context.
What is "emotional metabolic syndrome"? It is Crouch's phrase for the possible emotional and spiritual counterpart to metabolic syndrome. Just as a sedentary, machine-assisted life weakens the body, he warns that relationships with AI that never push back or cost anything could leave a generation with chronic emotional and spiritual weakness.
Why does friction matter for spiritual growth? Crouch argues that human beings often grow in learning to love God with their heart, soul, mind, and strength through resistance. In relationships that resistance has different forms, and can even be part of what happens in forgiveness. A relationship that never ruptures does not teach us to forgive or be forgiven.
What does "rupture and repair" mean? It describes how people grow emotionally through a wound or loss in a relationship, followed by restoration. Crouch gives the example of a baby whose mother leaves the room and returns, and says the pattern extends to forgiveness between adults.
Can AI help with theology? It can (but as we see in the episode, there’s nothing automatic about this!), according to Crouch, especially for people who are involved in deep formation and can push back on its ready-made answers. He recommends reading primary sources alongside it, because AI summarizes and can miss the surprising parts of thinkers like Calvin or Luther, and he warns against trusting it for exact quotations.
How is an AI companion different from an e-card? (This is a fun part to watch!) Crouch says it is on a continuum with earlier conveniences, but an intensification. An e-card does not attend to you. A large language model is interactive, has absorbed a vast record of human emotion, and builds context about you, which makes it a plausible simulation of someone who knows and cares for you.
Generated Transcript
Please note this is a generated transcript. The cold open and introduction include clips from the interview. The main interview begins about two minutes in and has three speakers: Scott Rice, Greg Fung, and Andy Crouch.
Sure — here it is in plain text:
Scott Rice (00:00.258)
In this theology lab on faith and ai, you'll hear both this.
Andy Crouch (00:03.942)
Otherwise, we are going to end up with emotional metabolic syndrome, a generation with a chronic disease, if we don't decide to use them in a different way. This is what I love about AI. It is reopening like with intensity all kinds of questions about what really matters. What is it to be human? This is an awesome time because we are revisiting things that we could have easily taken for granted.
Greg Fung (00:10.592)
And you're gonna hear this.
Scott Rice (00:35.742)
Yeah.
Drag those clips. It is going to be a good episode. We're joined by Andy Crouch from Praxis to talk about faith in AI. Andy is a well-known speaker and author. He deals with technology, community, and theology. Our conversation here is gonna be on artificial intelligence.
Greg Fung (00:53.838)
We just had a remarkable conversation with him in which he both warns against some very real potential unhealthy spiritual side effects of AI while also opening a window into some ways Christians need not be afraid of AI and in fact can bear a message of hope to our neighbors who do live in fear. Scott, what did it mean for you?
Scott Rice (01:13.912)
Yeah, there's this unexpected part that really stands out. And it's what does AI mean when we believe in a God who is alive? A God who shows up in surprising ways. And then this came out a lot in the episode, who forms us, especially through the challenges of life. Plus, we get to talk about AI and e-carp.
Greg Fung (01:32.086)
E cards, I love them. I still love them. I can't get enough of them. All right.
Scott Rice (01:36.014)
This is gonna be a two-part episode. Like the video and subscribe to the Theology Lab channel. And if your YouTube feed, it's anything like mine, which is mostly about how to become a professional tennis player even after you hit 40 years old. Well, you'll have theology lab videos waiting in your feed to help bring you back down to earth. What's better than that? Here's our conversation with Andy Crouch.
Andy Crouch, thanks so much for being on Theology Lab.
Andy Crouch (02:02.602)
It is a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Scott Rice (02:06.814)
this is going to be part of a series that we are doing on faith and artificial intelligence. And I want to get us started with a conversation that has to do with has to do with the friction of love and sacrifice and pain. but before I do that, I I just want to name for our guests and listeners. So you you've written a redemptive thesis on artificial intelligence. And the reason I mentioned that is, you know, we'll we'll have a link to it in the show notes for folks. But
I say it up front because it names both some of the challenges with AI, but also a lot of the opportunities. This is not just gonna be a super critical takedown artificial intelligence r risks and dangers. and it's not gonna be saying, hey, this is gonna come and save all of humanity's problems. So we'll be touching on both of those things. so Andy, let me jump into the first question here. you have said something about artificial intelligence AI.
one of the challenges that it can remove some of the the friction that we need in our relationships, especially around love and sacrifice and what goes into making a relationship very important. Can you say a little bit about what what do you mean by the importance of having this friction within our lives? And how does it relate to AI?
Andy Crouch (03:16.246)
Yeah, well, let's think about the role of friction i in the physical world first. first of all, if we didn't have it, we'd be in a lot of trouble because it's how we get anywhere. in a perfectly frictionless environment, you can't actually push p hardly push off against anything. and more deeply, in a frictionless environment, n nothing in you develops. So th in our you know, we've been living for a hundred years now with machines.
That are far stronger than human beings. And so most of the physical work that human bodies and to some extent animal bodies had to do before machines are is now done by machines. And we've learned, kind of the hard way, that a life without physical exertion is not actually good for the human body. So we're living right now in the midst of the first non infectious epidemic, pandemic really, in human history that is not carried by a bacteria bacteria or virus.
it's call y sometimes called metabolic syndrome. It's the combination of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high weight, high blood sugar, that ninety percent of Americans, including me, have one or more of these kind of symptoms. And it's basically because our bodies don't encounter resistance in the world in the course of a typical day of a typical sedentary, especially screen-based, knowledge-working American like me.
So what do I do? Well, I take some medication to kind of avert the worst effects of that. But I also I don't literally go to the gym. I hate gyms, but I work out very seriously. So I I go to my own gym. I have a gym in my basement. I'm out of my bike every day. I'm doing this this time of year, I'm doing pull-ups and push-ups every day at the kind of far end of my 20-mile bike ride. And what am I doing? I'm actually putting my body up against resistance.
To develop it, to devel it actually creates tears in your muscles. I just did pull-ups last night, I can feel it this morning. That's the feeling of my muscles having actually been kind of very at a micro scale, torn apart. But then that promotes kind of repair and strength. And we all kind of know whether we actually go to the gym or not, we know we should be. And we also know you don't bring a forklift to the gym. You don't bring a machine along with you that will do the lifting for you.
Andy Crouch (05:35.308)
You go precisely because you want to have the kind of physical strength that your environment isn't giving you. So with that as a background, is it possibly the case that it's not just in our strength that we need kind of resistance, and even you might say rupture and repair, but actually in the other three components of being human, which is heart, soul, and mind as well. So I take it from Jesus that.
What we are as human beings is heart, soul, mind, and strength, that our kind of prime directive, the greatest commandment, is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. if it's the case that for my strength, for me to have allness of strength, I have to be put up against resistance, could it be also I'll get to relationships in second, but even that for the mind, that for my mind to develop, it needs to encounter resistance. So I can't just
let the thinking machines think for me. I've actually got to work things through for myself against difficulty, with it being hard for a while to kind of grow intellectually, let's say. Well, I think clearly this is the case in relationships and the emotional life, the life of the heart, the life of connection and depth of connection to others.
and I these words rupture and repair are not mine originally. They come from my friend Kurt Thompson, who's a psychiatrist and Christian, write writes beautifully about these dynamics. And Kurt makes a really strong case that the only way you grow in life, beginning from infancy, emotionally grow, is through little and large experiences of rupture, that is some some kind of
Wound or loss is opened up in a relationship, initially between the baby and the mother. And the first stage of this is just mom goes away for like three minutes. And the baby's like, wait, wait, where is she? So like absence can be a rupture. And then presence repairs it. Mom comes back. And okay, I can trust that even though this person left me, they're coming back. So there's absence and presence, there's failure and recovery. That's when something goes wrong in our environment.
Andy Crouch (07:49.41)
Together and we overcome it together and we're like, okay, we made it through that. And then I think the deepest form of rupture and repair is sin and forgiveness. I actually it's not just that something goes wrong out there, something goes wrong inside me that comes out in the way I treat you or some some way that I behave. And then when you forgive me of of my having ruptured our relationship, that is actually how I grow. And if you think about how you've grown in your life.
Like the moments when you grew fastest. I almost am positive it was not when things were easy in your life. It was when things were difficult. Now, what are we doing with technology? We are step by step taking all four of these components of being human, heart, soul, mind, and strength, and starting with strength with machines a hundred plus years ago, continuing with com computers of seventy-five years ago.
Now with artificial intelligence, which is emotionally intelligent as well as kind of smart in the way computers used to be. Computers used to be really good at like doing calculations. Now they're really good at doing relationship and emotion. But each of these kind of technological developments is introducing a kind of factor into our lives that makes it possible to have a friction-free life. First, a friction-free life with the in the realm of strength, then a friction-free life in the realm of kind of elementary calculation and logical operations, computers.
And now I've got something I can talk to that is always present for me, is never absent. I I never call Claude and Claude doesn't answer. If Claude didn't answer, I wouldn't pay for Claude. And then Claude is always accommodating of me. And because Claude has no independent needs of its own, really, this is the anthropic chat, as everybody probably knows. all it's there for is to kind of mold itself to what it senses, and it's very good at sensing. I need.
Well, th I just want to propose that a a a relationship without rupture is not one in which you grow emotionally. And the more that we allow these things to kind of become our benchmarks for what a good friend is like, what a good counselor is like, what a good lover is like, we're actually going to lose the very essence of what it is to grow in our ability to love with heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Andy Crouch (10:10.786)
That was a very long answer, Scott. I'll turn out to be quite that long for now on, but I th this is the big picture as I see it. and and I think we've got to be very conscious of this kind of danger that we we redefine what good looks like based on machines that actually you mentioned love and sacrifice. They actually are making no sacrifice for us. That's the other thing. Like another person in relationship with you to put up with your ruptures and to and to
come to terms with their own ruptures and ask you for forgiveness and recover from failure with you and come back to be with you. That's a sacrificial act. And these machines, that just isn't a category that applies to them. but that's the deepest like reality of relationships. So yeah, let's be very careful about deploying these on on the emotional side of our lives. Just otherwise we are going to end up with emotional metabolic syndrome. That's really the bottom line. We will end up with a
A generation with a chronic disease, just like we have a generation of cr with chronic physical disease, we're gonna end up with a generation with chronic emotional and spiritual disease. If we are not if we don't decide to use them in a different way.
Greg Fung (11:16.406)
It's compelling, Andy. Do do you feel that it it seems that you feel that this is significantly different than say the conveniences of computers for for to smooth over relationships? And here's an example that I I I can think of. It's sort it's sort of trite, but you know, 20 years ago, e cards were kind of cool when they first came out for a a brief moment. And I still and hopefully this person isn't listening, but I have a
relative who programmed me in twenty years ago and they s like every year it still comes and I'm like Well I think the love is is gone from that that effort, but it was appreciated twenty years ago. I mean is it that is it that different? How would you how would you see that this is so different from the e card?
Andy Crouch (11:49.486)
I don't think the same thing.
Andy Crouch (12:04.32)
I mean, yeah, it's all on a continuum. It's all part of this long story where we're like, this will make our lives easier. And it does. It's just that the most important things in life actually don't get better when they get easier. so in that sense, like it just it adding more convenience. And but but the big difference is the e car doesn't know how to attend to you and your emotions. It's kind of a one way, it's a convenience for the sender, but
But the interactive nature of large language models and the fact that they've trained on the whole history actually of human emotion in a way. They've read all the literature, they've they've watched, you might say, and incorporated into their vectors, their models of of how what the right response is, they've incorporated relationship in. And so there's just something l like the the e card doesn't have a lot of allusion to it. It y you know that your relative just entered your email address one time twenty years ago.
And now just hits send every holiday or whatever. but but the but Claude listens to me. Claude like I used to joke that Siri, which is a I I shouldn't even say her name because I'll invoke her from one of my devices here. but that that Apple thing
Doesn't know that I'm married. I used to joke. Like I would say, call Catherine. Hey, so-and-so call Catherine. And it's like, do you want to call Catherine Alsdorf? I'm like, no. I mean every once in a while I call I'm married to Catherine Crouch. What are the chances I don't want to call my wife? well, I'm shopping the other day for I've it's not even important what it was. and I'm like, I should get some recommendations from the AI engine, which I have no trouble using AI for this kind thing. But
But then in the middle of like a discussion of it was headphones actually, it's like, Catherine will really appreciate if you wear these when you're listening to music or something like that. I'm like, why are you bringing up my wife? It was very creepy. But the point is, th these systems, as they accumulate context about you as the user, they become such a plausible simulation of someone who knows and loves and cares about you. And the e-card never did that.
Andy Crouch (14:10.508)
So that's the it's an i it's a real intensification because it's so interactive and it's so aware in a machine kind of way of who you are. That's that's all. That's a pretty big deal. in a lonely world, in a world where honestly we were not doing that well before AI came along, thanks to all the conveniences of social media and texting and all this stuff that removes friction from communication, we already were getting kind of unhealthy emotionally, but
Now you have this alternative that feels really good, but doesn't form you. And that's my that would be my caution, I guess.
Scott Rice (14:49.3)
So just a quick note for viewers and listeners, if you go to Hallmark eCards and you know it Greg at theology lab.org, I'm just gonna make a quick plug. There should be an option to have them sent annually. That's Greg at the
Andy Crouch (15:03.316)
I mean might as well be like monthly. Let's really flood his inbox.
Scott Rice (15:09.218)
You heard it from Andy Crouch himself. Andy, I wanna ask you a question about sermons. I actually think this is a question that's gonna come up a lot in this series. I'm gonna I'm gonna give you something maybe of a caricature and I want you to respond to this. So the question in general is what do think about using AI in sermons? But let me let me kind of specify this just a little bit. Let's imagine someone who has done 300 sermons and is maybe
Really looking for a little extra time. They have some pressures. They pastor a solo church, right? And this would free them up due to so much else. You can you can deal with that if that context if you want or not. But let's just imagine someone's got lot of sermons, puts them in an AI model, and then can get a sermon in seven or eight minutes, right? May maybe they can maybe they review it, maybe not, but there it is. They have the whole manuscript go on Sunday. when I share that with most people, right? Like they're like, there's something deeply uncomfortable.
about that situation, about listening and being the recipient of of such a sermon. and it can of course be very, very good. but it's a little bit harder then to kind of name, okay, Wake, why? Why am I uncomfortable with that? so I'm wondering if you might tell us your your thoughts on that. And maybe one of the questions we're we're getting at here that AI is helping us get at is like, what what are we really looking for when someone stands up to share with us?
Andy Crouch (16:31.778)
Yes, yes, yes, yes. No, you're right. And this is what I love about AI. It is reopening w like with intensity all kinds of questions about what really matters. What is it to be human? In this case, what is it to preach a sermon? yeah, it's this is an awesome time because we are revisiting things that we could have easily taken for granted. Well, you know, let me complicate a little bit. In in the oldest Christian traditions, it's quite common to read sermons that you didn't write.
so at Easter at the Easter Vigil every year in the Orthodox Church, Saint John Christostom's sermon, amazing sermon. I mean it's it's it's a baller, as they say. Like it's so, so good. is read aloud, word for word, the way the way it was transcribed when he wrote it in the fourth, fifth century whenever Christostom lived. So
there's a tradition in some churches that doesn't require that poor pastor to come up ex nielo every week with something to say that's relevant and almost as funny as the late night comics and, you know, and deeply theological. I mean, we we ask a lot of pastors. so what is it that we're looking for in the Protestant tradition? I I think the
The Protestant wager. so you know, the there's a to p I I don't know the exact proportions. Over half of the world's Christians like are perfectly comfortable with tradition carrying who along. and and in that sense, by the way, what you get when you ask AI to to kind of compose something for you, you get tradition. It you get the amalgamation of everything human beings have done so far.
And you and it spits out a plausible continuation of that tradition. the Protestant wager is that kind of like Joel says and Peter picks it up in Acts 2, that the spirit, the living spirit of God, has been poured out afresh in in these last days, which turns out to be a la long time, 2,000 years of counting, has been poured out on all kinds of people in such a way that n that God
Andy Crouch (18:53.258)
through his word that which does not change, nonetheless speaks in fresh ways through very ordinary vessels, not people even yeah, not people who are like quoting the tradition only, but who are actually in conversation with God through his spirit and his word. And we appoint and often hire or
Pay if we can, people to give themselves to the study of the word such that the spirit speaks to a particular people at a particular place. and that's why we're uncomfortable when w we would we Protestants would find it odd if we just read sermons from the past, whereas the Orthodox find that nor nom normal and and the normative, the normal thing, more than the the kind of composed or extemporaneous homily.
But if you're that pastor, I think what your congregation is wanting is a demonstration that God's alive in his word and in you. what does it mean to be alive? here's one way to think about it. Life is capable continually of doing things that are fruitful but are not predictable. So life can be f life bursts forth over and over in the world.
With things that you could not have predicted from the antecedent conditions, and yet in ways that are fruitful. So it's not just kind of random, because most randomness is not that good for the world, but it's unpredictable and yet fruitful. so if I can be a little technical, there's this this thing in machine learning called within distribution results, so or within distribution problems. So the first way we really cracked the code of AI was actually image recognition.
You'd give AI a whole bunch of images and you'd have it try to classify is this a cat or a dog, a lion or a mouse, whatever. And over time, it would get really good at if you give it a new image guessing what was in it. And as long as I should say that new image had things in it that it had seen before, and we call this within distribution. If you've ever seen like the bell curve, that's kind of a normal called a normal distribution of probability.
Andy Crouch (21:11.252)
And you can think of the bell curve as a as mapping out like most things are going to fall pretty much in the middle where the high part of the curve is. And as long as AI sees things that are within distribution, it can predict with amazing accuracy, it turns out, and flexibility, I should add, what what's coming next or what it's likely seeing, or what it w in the case of language, what it should say next. What what life continually does is give you things that are not on the bell curve. They're like way out at the tail.
They you never would have predicted them, and yet they here they are. By the way, this is what Jesus was like all the time. So when people ask Jesus a question, in the in the gospels, or give him what we'd call in LLM terms, a prompt. Like so what you do is you prompt the LLM, right? When Jesus when Jesus gets prompted, for example, teacher, who is who is my neighbor? good teacher, what is the greatest commandment?
teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me, et cetera, et cetera. I dare I defy you to find a time when Jesus gets a prompt and gives the expected or predictable continuation. There is one time, there's one time when Jesus pretty much gives exactly the answer you to expect. Do you you all are theologians, do you know what it is?
Scott Rice (22:33.556)
G I know, but Greg, we should ask Greg.
Andy Crouch (22:36.664)
Ha ha ha ha.
Greg Fung (22:41.294)
I I'm gonna go with l Love God and love love.
Andy Crouch (22:46.51)
Yes, yes, what is the greatest commandment? Shema Yisrael, hero Israel, the Lord of God is one, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength. Like every rabbi then and now would say that's the greatest commandment. Now the crazy thing is Jesus does two things that that rabbis don't always do. First, he he takes the three terms of the Shema, which I just said heart, soul, and strength. There's different ways to translate it, and he adds one, which we usually translate as mind. So he turns three into four, which is absolutely crazy. Like this is the best.
known text in Judaism, like literally the best known text. And Jesus messes with it. And then of course, as you said, Greg, he adds, and love your neighbor as yourself, which is not in the Shemmatz over in Leviticus. And yet Jesus says, actually you got to put these together. So even there, Jesus, but you know, he does give kind of the within distribution answer, though even there he like goes out on the tail of the curve and does these things you don't expect. Because Jesus was and is fully alive. That is every time he speaks or acts in the world,
It bursts forth with new possibility. Now, what is the LLM doing? It is giving you a within distribution sermon. It is giving you the average, the middle of the bell curve. Because when we let LLMs go too the technically we say stochastic, which is just a kind of precise way of saying random, that is, we let them go off out of distribution, they they spiral into total incoherence. They don't become fruitful when they become unpredictable, they become chaotic.
So we we har harness them, we corral them into the middle of the distribution and say, no, no, do the predictable thing. What your people, Pastor, are hoping for when they arrive on Sunday morning is that God is alive and that something is going to be said that they couldn't have predicted and yet that will open up truth and reality to them. And if you give them what an LLM said, it is the deadest thing you will ever preach because it is the mere mathematical
average of everything that's already been done. But you you are alive. You may be really tired. You may be too busy to fully prepare. You you may have all kinds of liabilities that we all carry, but you have a chance every Sunday if that's your job to like try to be alive with people and to discover that God's word is alive. And God's word doesn't say the thing you expect it to say all the time. So you know, I have sympathy for people who especially in the scenario you said, Scott, who'd
Andy Crouch (25:12.128)
you know, are really trying to do kind of an impossible job. and to show up on Sunday ready with something. And I would just say, I would rather you show up unprepared and if necessary, just well, br have John Chrysostom in your back pocket. And if you really got nothing, just say, I got nothing, but here's something good from the tradition. Yeah. Or show up and say, let's open the word together and I'm going to do my best. This was not the best week. I'm not as ready as I should be.
Lord have mercy. I promise the Holy Spirit will come in that moment. But the Holy Spirit cannot operate through a dead text that is just the average of what's happened before because the Spirit is the Lord, the giver of life. The Spirit is not the repeater of what has already been. So that's what's at stake in that decision. As as as profound as what is is at stake is in great contrast to to the kind of mundane thing where you just feel like I'm so busy, I don't have time.
And it'll do a good enough job. It's not good enough for what God is actually doing in the world.
Greg Fung (26:14.906)
It makes me wonder in the in the positive sense then, given that AI it's not a lie, but can it help us or does it already help us think more theologically now? have you seen examples of that or can you imagine examples where AI serves us again from a theological perspective to think more theologically broadly, accurately, thoughtfully?
Andy Crouch (26:38.912)
I think so in probably two ways. One is the actual content of what you can elicit from it. if you are a formed person, AI is awesome. That is, and this is true across many domains. that is the more and we have a fair amount of evidence that the people who are really helped by AI
in a given domain are people who have quite a bit of expertise and they can sort of sort out where it's actually not that helpful, but it it can be a real force multiplier for working on any given problem, whether it's a legal problem, an accounting problem. but it's also read all the theology. So I mean I use it to check my instincts about things, to kind of probe my intuitions about theological and biblical topics, because it's got access with amazing
speed and co comprehensiveness to everything that's that's that you could find on the internet. Now th the only reason that is helpful is that I, God willing, I hope this is true of me, have have pursued a life of formation intellectually and spiritually, so that I've I've got s I've got something to push back against when I get that within distribution answer. I'm doing my own reading
that exposes me aga you know, the thing is AI is always a summary. you can't actually it by design it it cannot quote texts. It it it's they're to some extent they're getting a little better at this, but never rely on it to give you a word for word quote from from a text because it the the internal model is not set up to do that. It the y they can build scaffolding on top that goes and gets the answer for you and then that's fine.
But the the essential design of an LLM is to synthesize. And I will say the moment you synthesize, you start missing things that are in the original. So you tell you say, tell me what Calvin said about something, something, something. And it'll tell you a good summary. These days it's really very good. But you go back and read Calvin, you're gonna find life. That is, you're gonna find fruitful, unpredictable, out of distribution, things you wouldn't think Calvin would say.
Andy Crouch (28:51.414)
Or that you wouldn't think he'd say them in that way. Sometimes they'll be amazing, sometimes they'll be very unsettling, and you're like, ooh, I wish he hadn't said that. It's even worse when you read Martin Luther, by the way. like he's following, you know, these were complicated, real human beings, and AI will shave off all the all the complexity. So the only reason it's helpful to me is that I am p in parallel doing I'm I'm actually engaging with the real rather than just a summary of the real. But gosh, as a to summarize and to synthesize, it's super helpful.
So that would be one way in which and by the way, it these days, this is also a a moving frontier, but the models are getting better at not giving you, first of all, total hallucinations. And also they're getting better at telling you when you're wrong about something. They're like, well, actually, it is really this way. And when there really is a solid consensus out there, I think they're gonna save people from a lot of silly errors. probably least in theology where the errors are the most subtle.
But they're gonna save you from doing stupid things legally that people used to do, stupid things in accounting that people used to do, stupid things in coding that people like they're good at like telling you, no, that won't work. theologically is, I mean, the deepest the deepest waters human beings swim in. And so it's least easy to say when you're exactly wrong and how you're wrong. now, the other way it's helping us theologically, as we kind of referred to, is it is re-raising the question of.
What is God really like? What are human beings for? Why do we value the human so much? should should humans be this are are humans the apex of creation, or should they actually be superseded? A number of influential people making AI at the highest level believe human beings should be superseded. If we agree, why? If we don't agree, why? Like these are massively important questions that if you knew where to look, people have been talking about them for a long time.
But now like they're right in front of us. And I think that's tremendously gr what an amazing time to be a theologian or a philosopher. Like this is the best time to be a philosopher, which is just kind of theology to to theology's like a s I think a kind of subset you can think of it two ways. th that philosophy is a subset of theology or the other way around, but to to c think carefully about the world, which is the work of philosophers, and then to think carefully about God and his word, which is the work of theologians.
Andy Crouch (31:12.258)
Like that's more important and more viscerally important than it's been a long time. So it's so cool that that's happening.
Scott Rice (31:19.03)
That's the end of part one of our interview with Andy Crouch. Part two is going to take up one of my favorite questions that Greg asks. What if we could invent the perfect Christian chatbot that had all of the right answers? What if anything would still be missing? That'll be out soon. Thanks for watching Theology Lab.
